Battleangel

The much anticipated “Star Wars Empire at War” is finally out. I spent the better part of the day testing the various aspects of the game and I’m fairly impressed, seeing as it is a franchise game and all. Still, to get the most out of the game one has to be a total Star Wars devotee, and I don’t quite qualify for that. The game quickly became repetitive, especially on land. Space battles on the other hand are typically just too damn fast, while land battles just drag on and on. I found myself using the pause button every other second, setting up multiple moves and seeing them play out. The game didn’t feel quite alright in “real” real-time.

On a technical note, no one has released a no-cd patch as of yet. But the Securom protection was easily defeated using the newest CureROM 1.3.1. Mounting worked just fine in Daemon Tools 3.47 too, so no need to upgrade to DT4+. I’ve been hearing some pretty scary stories about how DT4 can mess up your system by corrupting its own sys drivers in the case of an untidy shutdown. It may just be scuttlebutt or incompetence, but because of the pervasiveness of copy protections these days, these countermeasures are becoming almost as volatile. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.